


Restraint

by grainjew



Category: Wander Over Yonder
Genre: Agender Wander, C Peeps Screwed Up: The Fic, Evil Wander, Gen, also, evil wander is an awful person and disturbingly fun to write, i love peepers i really do but he didn't make his smartest moves in this fic, maybe i'll stop now but probably not, oh i feel like maybe this qualifies as hurt/comfort? but not enough for me to tag it that, this is yet another concession to my love of Good protagonists being terrifying
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-18
Updated: 2016-04-18
Packaged: 2018-06-02 22:38:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6585382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grainjew/pseuds/grainjew
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Peepers decides that the best way to get rid of that perpetual irritation known as Wander is to turn them into a villain. </p><p>Nothing goes as planned, and everything hurts. </p><p> </p><p>Wander stretched, a languid movement. “Aww, Sylvia,” they said, voice all mocking and so un-Wanderish that Sylvia wasn’t sure whether to scream or cry, “are you afraid of little old me?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Restraint

**Author's Note:**

> A late birthday present for Chrissie @[mindful-owls](http://mindful-owls.tumblr.com/) , who also helped me write the thing

Lord Hater’s torture room looked as overly dramatic as usual, all reds and blacks and the eerie glow of the lava pit. Sylvia glanced around from where she stood handcuffed to Wander and the wall, taking in Peepers fiddling with some shiny device, the pair of Watchdogs with blasters trained on her, Hater monologuing all pompous in the center. With her strength and Wander’s subtle probability manipulation, she could break the cuffs effortlessly, but Wander must have been rubbing off on her, because she found herself actually curious to see what Hater would try this time. Wander was just bouncing a little in excitement, grinning quietly to themself.

Hater had stopped monologuing at some point, and Sylvia turned her head to see Peepers walking towards them, gingerly holding his shiny device. It looked something like a blaster, but short and oddly pyramidal.

“This is my latest invention,” he said, voice sharp and trying for menacing, standing only a few feet away now. “It will shut off all of your morality and do-gooderness, and then” he pointed it at Wander, “you will _finally_ be out of our hair. Er.” Peepers touched the top of his eyeball. “Our metaphorical hair.”

“I _really_ don’t think that’s a good idea,” said Wander. Sylvia looked over to see them frowning, completely serious.

Peepers laughed. “You’re just afraid.”

He fired--

“I’m so sorry,” whispered Wander, and Sylvia was frozen

\--and the blast of purple light hit Wander square in the chest.

Their entire bearing changed, softness bleeding away like darkness from a sunrise, and a slow smile stretched its way across their face, subtly _wrong_ in all the worst ways, eyes slightly narrowed and teeth showing. Sylvia had never considered Wander’s teeth terrifying before, but as they shook the cuffs from their hands, easy as jellyfish pie, she realized suddenly why they had been worried about the device.

They stretched, a languid movement. “Aww, Sylvia,” they said, voice all mocking and so un-Wanderish that Sylvia wasn’t sure whether to scream or cry, “are you afraid of little old me?”

“Wander,” she said, and then her throat blocked and she couldn’t say anything more.

“Ha! You’ve lost me, your precious, precious Wander.” They sat down then, all casual-like, and smiled up at her, the most malicious smile she’d ever seen. “Oh, you must be having regrets now, aren’t you? If only you’d done a little more, been a little more proactive, you could have protected me from becoming _this_!” They gestured at themself, a flourish, then stood and spun around in an eyeblink, pointing at Hater. “And you! Oh Hatey, Hatey, Hatey… So naive, so impotent, so thoughtless. You thought you could get rid of me like this? All you’ve done is removed all of this personality’s pesky little moral restraints.”

The Watchdogs fired their blasters. The shots went wide.

“I--” said Hater. “It was Peepers’s--”

“Oh, was it?” Wander took a step towards Peepers, tilting their head a little to the side, birdlike. Sylvia had never been so glad to be unable to see their face. “Well, how does it feel to have failed the boss you prize so much? Aww, but you do that _all the time_ , don’t you?” The device slipped from Peepers’s hands, clanging to the floor. Wander picked it up in one fluid movement and unhesitantly tossed it straight into the lava pit. Sylvia felt a last flicker of hope die in her chest, snuffed under a frightening numbness. “Maybe he’ll actually fire you this time!”

Peepers cowered away from Wander’s looming form, skittering back a little. Sylvia couldn’t exactly blame him. The concept of Wander looming at _all_ was so _wrong_.

No-one spoke for a few moments, the only sound the scratching of Peepers’s boots on the floor and the soft swish of Wander’s fur, and then Wander turned abruptly on their heel, grinning at Sylvia and Hater in turn. “Well, it was nice seeing you all, but I’ve gotta be off now! Places to go, things to see, people to break and all, you know how it goes.” They walked out of the room, steps light.

Stillness like a held breath for a split second, and then Peepers crashed to the ground, legs giving out. Hater screamed something, but Sylvia couldn’t hear because she was off running, the manacle-chains pulled straight out of the wall and trailing behind her, pulse pounding in her ears.

She wouldn’t think--she _couldn’t_ think--if she started thinking she wouldn’t be able to stop.

Half-insensible, she ran through the corridors of Hater’s ship, noting detachedly the semiconscious bodies of Watchdogs slumped here and there as though they’d been swept aside by a passing hurricane, the blackened markings on the walls from blaster shots gone wide. The trail led to the engine room.

Well. What used to be the engine room. The acrid smell of smoke and burning metal shocked Sylvia back to herself, and she came to a halting, stumbling stop in front of smoldering wreckage, the last remains of the ship’s ability to move. She wondered if all the Watchdogs operating the thing had gotten out before Wander--

A flash of orange in the corner of her eye. She turned to face Wander, and they smirked at her, leaning all languid against the wall. They raised an eyebrow. “Well? Gonna capture me?” They tapped their chin mockingly. “Then again, what would you do if you did catch me? Lose yourself to your anger and beat up your best friend? Oh, now _that_ would make you feel guilty.” Their smirk faded a little to something more contemplative. “You’d _never_ forgive yourself! I’m almost tempted to let it happen, just to see that self-hating look on your face.” They straightened. “But, well, I’ve got a whole universe to make miserable, so I can’t be wasting _too_ much time on you.”

They darted around a corner, and she charged after them, desperately numb to the grief she could feel creeping up on her. Branching hallways sped by, peppered with more battered Watchdogs who had gotten in Wander’s way. Someone shouted something over the intercom, and the corridors cleared after that, which made running a bit easier. Before she knew it she was standing in front of one of the ship’s huge red-glass eyes, strangely concave from the inside.

Then a deafening cracking sound rang out and she was scrambling backwards as giant pieces of blood-red glass tumbled down like some deadly rain. “Bye, Syl!” she heard, muffled through the skin of an orbble bubble, and over the jaunty sounds of a banjo, “I suggest giving up on me!”

The last echoes of their voice faded, and then, silence.

Wander was gone.

Sylvia sat down, gingerly.

The last few shards of glass tinkled onto the floor, a sharp staccato.

Wander was gone.

The adrenaline of the chase faded from her, leaving a sharp core of rage. She needed to hurt something.

Peepers. This was his fault.

 _My fault. I should have acted_.

Where was Peepers?

 _I lost Wander_.

She considered standing up and hunting him down, but all of a sudden she had no strength left, so she just slumped closer to the ground. Here and there she felt the sharp sting of glass biting into her skin, but she ignored it.

Time passed.

Voices.

Voices she knew.

Anger gave her energy again, and she stood slowly, turned to face the ones responsible for this.

“Peepers,” she said, and her voice was a growl. “Do you _realize_ what you’ve done?”

He jumped. “How was I supposed to know they’d be like-- like _this_?” He blinked twice, shooting frantic glances around at all the scattered broken glass. “Of course I underestimated them, I had no indication they could actually _do_ anything except be an annoyance!”

“So you thought turning them evil would be a good idea?”

“It made sense! Their stupid distracting helpfulness was what was making him hate them so much. Kill the helper without killing the host. It was a _logical_ solution.”

“Well,” Sylvia crossed her arms, anger barely in check, “you caused this problem, so you’d better flarping fix it.” She glared at the overgrown eyeball.

The overgrown eyeball glared back. “I _can’t_ fix it just like that, you _saw_ them throw the device into the lava pit! There wasn’t even a reverse setting on it!”

“Then make a new one! You still have your blueprints, don’t you?”

Peepers’s voice had gone high with frustration. “Can’t we just kill them?”

“Absolutely not,” said Sylvia, cracking her knuckles. “One, _I_ ’d kill _you_ before you even moved a single step, and two, do you really think that’ll work? Wander is both very smart and has _probability manipulation_. I don’t even know if they _can_ die.”

“They _what_?”

"Oh, please. You thought I was the brains of the group?" She snorted. "I'm the more sensible one, but Wander is much cleverer than me. And they have _absolutely no reason_ to hide that anymore." She narrowed her eyes. “You _will_ get me my friend back.”

“I--” said Peepers, but he wasn’t getting any sympathy from her today, not even if half his worldviews had been overturned.

“I don’t think I need to tell you what will happen if you don’t.”

His voice trembled. “N-no, you don’t--”

“Hey, are you guys gonna keep on ignoring me?” Hater. She’d forgotten he was there. A blissful state.

“Yes,” they said, synchronously. Sylvia looked away from Peepers’s gaze.

“What do you think they’re going to do?” asked Peepers. His voice was tentative. Good.

Sylvia whipped her stare back to the eyeball. “I don’t know, strike terror into the hearts of many? They said something about making the entire universe miserable. Is that enough for you?”

“But that about conquering planets?”

“Have you _ever_ seen Wander do _anything_ the normal way, Peepers?” Sylvia took a step towards the door. “Now, about that device...”

Peepers skittered after her, and behind them Hater yelled out: “But you don’t _understand_! _Wander_ might be more evil than _me_!”

The next few days passed like centuries. The Watchdogs sorted through the engine room wreckage in some attempt to get the ship running again, and every moment Peepers wasn’t supervising that, he was working on a device to get Wander back to normal. Hater prowled the ship, throwing tantrums and electricity indiscriminately.

Nobody dared to touch Sylvia. She drifted between hovering over Peepers’s shoulder as he worked and frantically combing through news sources to get clues on Wander’s whereabouts, between incandescent anger and staggering numb grief. Logically she knew that she shouldn’t be mourning, and that she shouldn’t blame herself, but logic never really seemed to apply when Wander was around. Or. Wasn’t around.

On the third day, she finally gave into the inevitable and checked the villain leaderboard. It felt like she was admitting something awful when she began to scroll.

Wander, despite having no planets to their name, was a third of the way up the list.

On the fourth day, a shout of triumph filtered up from the engine room. The ship could move again.

An hour later, Peepers slumped in relief, gently setting down a completed device cobbled together out of chrome and desperation and several gallons of coffee.

Within fifteen minutes, Sylvia had confirmed Wander’s location, and they set course for Bingleborp.

They landed as unobtrusively as the ship could, out of sight of the Bingleborpolopolis, and Peepers ordered the Watchdogs to stay on the ship and keep Lord Hater in his room so he couldn’t screw up the plan. To the ones who looked dubious, Sylvia added “for Wander’s sake,” which seemed to convince them. Peepers looked put out.

Walking through the city, Sylvia couldn’t help but notice the overwhelming misery of the place, contrasting the cheerful pinks and apricots of the buildings and the people. Occasional buildings had been reduced to rubble in no pattern Sylvia could discern, except that each one was surrounded by a group of swaying, wailing binglebops. Sylvia crouched down next to one who was crying alone in a corner, skin purple like a dawn on Balzaria 9, and asked for directions.

The binglebop took a deep breath. “They, they were about to just walk by me, when they stopped and looked at me, and they just said, completely certain ‘I know what you fear most. It will happen in the next nine days.’ And then they just walked on, with that awful, _awful_ smile.” The binglebop scrubbed at their tear-streaked face with one hand, shaking softly. “Actually looking for them is… it’s suicide. I wouldn’t do it. I would stay as far away as I could. But. If you’re sure about this. They went that way.” They pointed. “To the palace.”

The treck to the palace was gloomy, to say the least, and when she finally arrived, it was almost a relief. The throne room was long and lined with columns, the throne itself a small ornate thing. Wander was standing, leaning casually against the arm of it, and smirking down at King Bingleborp, who knelt on the floor, his whole posture radiating terror.

Before Sylvia was two steps into the room, Wander snapped their gaze up to her. Their smile widened, sharpened. Sylvia quickly retracted her tentative relief.

“Sylvie! What a pleasant surprise! I take it you didn’t follow my advice, then?” They glanced contemptuously down at the king cowering at their feet, kicked him a little to get him out of the way. “What a useless monarch. Can’t even keep his people happy.”

They stepped towards Sylvia, all fluid and confident and menacing somehow in spite of being three feet tall, and she stumbled back a step before she could stop herself. “Did you come here thinking you could get me back to “normal” with the _power of fwendship_ , perhaps? Make some gesture _so incredibly touching_ that I would _have_ to remember who I was?”

Wander was close, now, and she flinched away involuntarily as they raised a hand to her neck, only for them to stroke it in some scornful imitation of past affection.

“Well! Sorry, but that’s not happening. You didn’t protect me, and now the Wander you know is gone. You’ll just have to live with that!” They grabbed at her reins and jerked down, so abruptly that her head spun with the force of it. When her gaze focused again, she found Wander’s own eyes staring straight into hers, black and endless and completely without mercy, fringed by that wayward orange fur she’d run her hands through too many times to count. And then there was a knifepoint at her throat. She swallowed.

Wander smiled, and their grin was full of teeth and a sort of sick, mocking pity, offset by the jaunty set of their hat and its gaudy yellow star. The whole combination spelled out in detail a miserable life and a slow, agonizing death. It took all her willpower not to give in to simple terror.

Still gripping her reins hard in one hand, they ran the knife down the line of her throat, just hard enough to feel disturbingly sharp without actually splitting skin. Sylvia tried her best to stay perfectly still. _Endure_.

“You know, I’m kind of shocked that you haven’t tried to punch me yet. You finally make some tiny piece of progress with your temper the exact moment it would serve you so well to knock me out.” The pressure from the knife vanished from her throat. “And don’t give me that look, either. As though you couldn’t hurt me! You were a bad person when we met, and you’re a bad person now. Look at you, letting a villain like me do whatever they want without even fighting back.”

She was suspended in a neutral state, cocooned somewhere between anger and self-loathing and guilt. Her entire body was trembling, she noticed distantly. That probably wasn’t good.

 _Endure_.

_Peepers, hurry up._

Wander stepped back a few steps, letting her reins fall loose from their hand, that cruel-creepy smile spreading across their face again. Sylvia didn’t move. What was the point? No what Wander said ( _I_ _’m a bad person, but_ ), she couldn’t hurt her best friend. She just had to wait, present an open target for them to fixate on, and endure. It was all she could do.

“Well? Nothing to say to your best friend, Sylvia old pal?” They tilted their head a little, expectant.

And then she caught a flash of purple out of the corner of her eye, and something hit them, sending them staggering. They collapsed, and Sylvia ran forward almost unthinkingly, years of built-up instincts screaming _protect_. She stopped on impulse just before she reached down to pick them up.

“Wander?” She sounded too tentative.

They sat up slowly, turned around, looked up at her. “Sylvia…” Their voice was small, and every other sound snagged on itself. “I’m so sorry.” Tears made roads in their fur, staining it dark.

She had never seen them look so much like that helpless part of them as they did now, and so she knelt, and picked them up gently. “Buddy, I…”

They looked up at her, and _oh_ those eyes were Wander’s eyes, endless and brimming. “So many people, Syl. I hurt…” A gasping breath. “I hurt so many people.” Another breath. “I hurt _you_.”

Distantly, she heard Peepers say something like “I’m just gonna… go now,” but she paid no attention.

“Not your fault, buddy.” They shook their head, a minute movement. “You were forced into becoming that.”

They grabbed at her, clutching tightly, voice quietly horrified. “I _enjoyed_ it, Sylvia.”

“That person wasn’t you,” she said, almost desperate.

Wander smiled a little, sickly and miserable. “Oh, but it _was_ me. Not the whole of me, but… that was me just as much as anything else I’ve ever felt, anything else I’ve ever done.” They looked up at her, eyes wide and honest. “You’re a better person than me, Sylvia. I know you think you’re bad, but… you are so incredibly, astoundingly _good_.”

“Wander,” said Sylvia, then she stopped, searching for words.

They shook themself a little. “But here I am, being selfish, while all these people are hurting because of me. I need to fix this. All of this.” They tried to grin, and if it was shaky at the edges, Sylvia didn’t say anything. “Never hurts to help, after all!” They took another breath, clambered out of the Sylvia’s arms. “And _boy_ do these people need help.”

Sylvia watched them walk over to King Bingleborp, trembling but determined to make things right, and she thought: _You are so much better than I could ever be._

**Author's Note:**

> For extra pain, try listening to [Love Like You](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6nvQc8So0s/) now


End file.
